It goes both ways now I think – the latest version of WordPress sports an admin header that is very reminiscent of Drupal 7 🙂

I think it’s a no-brainer that Drupal needs to become easier to use in order for more people to want to use it as their CMS. I think it’s also a no-brainer that currently WordPress is a leader in the field when it comes to the UX of web content management.

That leaves two options: try to strike out on an entirely different path or to build on the work that WordPress have done so far and contribute back some more suggestions/improvements. Obviously we’ve taken the latter path and I think that, given the open source environment, that makes complete sense. From a UX perspective, it also makes sense – trying to build conventions and make all the systems easier for more people to use by approaching similar problems in a similar way rather than by making people learn entirely new UIs every time they interact with a different CMS.

So, you can be inflammatory and call it ‘copying’ or you can take a philosophy more akin to open source and consider it re-use, improving, and contributing UI across the various CMS projects. It makes a lot more sense to do this – providing we do it openly – and for all our of interfaces to improve, than it does to focus on being different for the sake of it – especially given how much ground we have to make up.